The book-to-Hollywood movie pipeline can be, well, unreliable (I’m looking at you, Hillbilly Elegy, not that the source material in that particular case was so unimpeachably good to begin with), but still, I can’t help being excited for the forthcoming big-screen adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel Nightbitch. The film, which stars Amy Adams as a new mom caught offguard by her sudden transformation into a dog, dropped its first full-length trailer on Tuesday; watch it for yourself below.
Yoder’s novel so expertly and visually illustrates the art monster trope of a mother caught between her creative, “feral” self and her domestic responsibilities that it’s hard to imagine a filmic representation hitting as hard as the writer’s original prose. (I mean, wasn’t the process of depicting therianthropy—which I just learned is a word for human-animal shapeshifting in narratives—always going to look…kind of CGI-ish, and dispense with the subtlety of the writing?)
With that obvious caveat aside, Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Nightbitch actually has me wanting to see the movie, which is really all you can ask of a two-minute snippet. Heller’s debute feature, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, certainly proved that she can nail the balancing act of telling a truly offbeat story about women’s lives onscreen.
The film seems vaguely in the mold of Tully and early seasons of Joey Soloway’s Transparent—young-ish, reasonably affluent white artist turned stay-at-home mom alternately appreciating and despairing of her domestic circumstances—but the feral, fable-esque twist that characterizes Yoder’s novel seems like it should translate reasonably well into Heller’s dry, fantastical sensibility.
